


Measure Up

by CrimeAlley1048



Category: Batfamily - Fandom, Batman (Comics), Batman and Robin (Comics), Nightwing (Comics), Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics), Robin (Comics)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2016-05-25
Packaged: 2018-06-10 16:44:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6964948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrimeAlley1048/pseuds/CrimeAlley1048
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An angst collection centered around height</p>
            </blockquote>





	Measure Up

Dick didn’t mean to get nostalgic, but sometimes it happened— the Manor was like that. It was hard to walk through a decade of memories without feeling them, especially when everything looked the same. Of course it did. Bruce didn’t like it when things changed on him.

  
Dick ran a hand over the kitchen counters as he passed, up onto the wall and across the room. Yeah, exactly the way he remembered, minus Alfred at the stove. He was out today, probably at the grocery store or waiting in a middle school parking lot somewhere. It was about that time.

  
His circled the kitchen until his fingers hit the doorframe and stuck on the tape measure glued alongside the wood, right on top of his own name written in Bruce’s handwriting, accompanied by a date six years old. He’d been awfully small back then, hadn’t he? Dick bent down to read the very bottom of the chart, smiling a little bit at the memory— he would have been eight back then. He made Bruce mark his own height on the wall the first time, even though Bruce had protested that he already knew how tall he was. But that wasn’t the point, and he’d given in eventually.

That mark was still there: the highest one on the wall. Dick remembered staring at it every time he got measured, pleased by the way the gap closed as he grew taller, wondering if it would ever close entirely. It didn’t. Dick had stopped growing four inches beneath Bruce’s 6’2.

  
He was trying not to take that metaphorically.

  
Measure up, he thought. Funny. He paused over the only thing about the kitchen that had changed— the two marks on the height wall that said _Jason_ (half an inch and three months apart) and wondered if Jason stared at Bruce’s mark too. Or maybe even Dick’s.

  
Good luck, Dick thought, and left.

\---------------------

Tim understood why Bruce was angry, although “angry” might have been the wrong word. He was _upset_ really, but on Bruce upset and angry looked the same— like slamming doors and punches that were just a little bit too hard. Like not looking Tim in the eye, but staring at him when he thought he wouldn’t notice.

  
He noticed. Hard not to.

  
You didn’t do anything wrong, he reminded himself, and Bruce knows that. He’ll get over it in a few days. He always does.

  
Until then, Tim figured it was best to stay out of the way. He was hiding out in the kitchen, well away from Bruce, staring at the cause of this month’s episode: the growth chart in by the door, specifically two marks labeled _Tim_ and _Jason_.

  
Tim’s mark was higher. That made it official— he was taller than Jason had ever been.

  
Bruce must have seen that coming, but maybe plain seeing it was harder. Tim didn’t blame him for being upset or angry or whatever he was— maybe feeling upset made him angry?— especially when he felt guilty himself. He didn’t mean to outgrow Jason, by any definition. He was just… growing. By himself. Shouldn’t that be a good thing?

  
Yes. But that didn’t mean it was good for Bruce.

  
Tim tapped aimlessly on the kitchen table, searching for the source of the guilt he could feel eating through his chest. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He was doing his best to minimize the problem. What else was there?

  
It was perfectly reasonable for Bruce to be upset. Jason was his son— a more important person than Tim, who was not— and death was hard to handle. Tim knew that. More important. Jason was more important.

  
Tim wished he wasn’t. He hated himself for wishing that.

\---------------------

Damian thought seriously about punching the wall, but in the end, he settled for a sustained glare. Today wasn’t the day to make a mess. He pulled a bench from underneath the kitchen table and sat down, swinging his legs up beside him. Stupid wall. Stupid kitchen. Stupid _house_.

  
He didn’t want to be there. He wanted to go home, back to the Tower and the sunset on the city skyline that he was missing to wait alone in the Manor kitchen. He didn’t want to live in his father’s empty mansion. He didn’t want to _do_ this.

  
Damian let his head drop into his knees for five carefully counted seconds, then straighten up again. Enough. He was fine.

  
He went back to glaring at the wall. There was a plastered-over hole near the cabinets, he noticed, and a slash along the base boards that looked suspiciously like a knife trail. Then there was the empty doorframe and the jumbled mess of measurements beside it.

  
Damian knew about the height wall. He was already on it, just once, from one of Grayson’s trips back to the Manor. That had been months ago, long before his father reappeared. Damian didn’t see the point in marking his height in a house they’d more or less abandoned, but Grayson insisted. He said it was traditional.

  
Damian slid off the bench to get a closer look. He ran a hand up the side of the wall, from the lowest mark to as high as he could reach, which was nowhere near the top. There were dozens of black lines drawn from the measuring tape, each accompanied by a name and a date. A lot of them were older than Damian.

  
He rubbed at the nearest line labeled _Tim_ , hoping he could smear it away. Nothing. Permanent marker, he figured, so he found Drake’s highest mark instead and stood underneath it, trying to gauge if Drake had grown since then. Damian didn’t think so. He could beat that, he decided. Drake wasn’t very big.

  
The highest line on the wall was his father’s. Damian had to look a long way up to read the name.

  
He sat back on the bench and took intentionally deep breaths. You’re fine, he told himself, because it was true. So his father didn’t care for him. He would, eventually. Right? Damian was better now. Everybody said so, even Drake when he thought Damian couldn’t hear him.

  
Maybe this time he would be good enough.

  
Grayson stuck his head through the door. “Hey. You’re all moved in.” He leaned back against the frame. “I need to go.”

  
“And?” Damian asked, carefully expressionless.

  
“And he’s in the living room. Call me if you need to, okay? I’ll check in tomorrow.”

  
Damian decided to stay in the kitchen a little longer.

\---------------------

Jason hadn’t meant to run into Alfred, but he wasn’t sorry he had. They were washing the dishes, standing around the sink in a way that was familiar from years ago. Jason took the plate that Alfred offered him, ran a dishtowel around it until it was dry, and set it on the stack in the cabinet. That part was new. He hadn’t been able to reach the cabinet the last time he and Alfred cleaned the kitchen.

  
Jason glanced at the wall behind him— at the new mark near the top of the height chart, only a few inches below Bruce’s line. A few inches above Grayson’s tallest, which amused Jason in a vague kind of way. He remembered standing by the wall when he was younger, comparing his own height to however tall Dick had been at that age. Dick used to grow faster than he did—Jason never quite managed to measure up.

  
He turned back to the sink, smiling at the old joke that didn’t apply anymore.

  
Alfred had seen him looking. He handed Jason the last plate and switched off the sink.

  
“Sometimes I forget,” he admitted.

  
“Me too,” said Jason, folding his towel. “Especially here.” There was a doorway in the east wing— one of the entrances to the library— that was abnormally low. Bruce always ducked underneath it, but Jason kept forgetting to do the same. He rubbed at the top of his head. That kind of thing happened a lot.

  
Alfred was watching him sadly.

  
“It’s not as bad as it used to be,” Jason told him. He gestured to the wall behind them, at the space separating his fifteen-year-old height from the new mark. “I think most of it happened between resurrection and the pit. I don’t remember that part, so I just… woke up like this.” That was more information than he usually cared to share, but hey— this was Alfred. “It took some getting used to, but it’s a nice advantage in a fight, so I don’t…” Jason trailed off when he saw Alfred’s eyes shift behind him.

  
Bruce was standing in the doorway, quietly studying the new line on the chart. It had taken him all of two seconds to notice the addition.

  
“Don’t worry,” said Jason. “I’m leaving.”

  
Bruce moved aside to clear the door. He didn’t seem to want to look at Jason today. Good. That meant no yelling.

  
Bruce had asked him about it once, Jason remembered— in the middle of a fight, like it was important. ‘How tall are you?’ He couldn’t remember if he had answered.

  
There, he thought, banging through the front door. Now you know.


End file.
